This ad for the Pixtone Mechanical Stone Picker appeared in the June 1955 issue of Better Farming. It was designed to remove stones from others good topsoil to improve crop yields and prevent damage to expensive machinery. Mechanical stone pickers were not invented until the 1940s, and before that the job had to be done manually in a tough and time-consuming process.
The first mechanical stone picker was invented by a Saskatchewan machine shop owner named Peter Anderson in the late 1940s. His original design was powered by its own engine, and was an important innovation that helped launch a number of stone picking companies in Saskatchewan. The model featured in the Better Farming advertisement, the Pixtone, was designed by the American petroleum company Sinclair in the early 1950s. Unlike Anderson’s original design, the Pixtone was an engineless two-wheeled implement attached to a tractor. This reduced the cost of the Pixtone by utilizing the tractor, which were increasingly commonplace on North American farms following the Second World War. In fact, in 1954, the number of tractors exceeded the number of horses and mules on American farms for the first time.